Engineer Cecil Balmond brings a new kind of bridge to the U.S. when his braided Weave Bridge opens on the University of Pennsylvania's campus in February.

Footpaths meander and gradually coil together to create the Weave Bridge in Philadelphia. The span is a poetic solution to a pedestrian problem: how to get people across railroad tracks that bisect the University of Pennsylvania campus. It's also a quintessential creation of Cecil Balmond, a structural engineer at the British design firm Ove Arup, who is reshaping skylines from London to Taiwan and whose work includes dozens of radical structures around the world. (The cantilevered CCTV tower in Beijing will be one of the most talked-about buildings next year.) Scheduled to open this February, the Weave Bridge, Balmond's first solo work in the U.S., announces the arrival of a new aesthetic: sleek, geometric designs as open in their function as the columns of a Greek temple -- if M.C. Escher conceived that Greek temple. For instance, the coil at the near end of the span doesn't wrap around a support column; it is the support column. One structure does the work of two. Simple. But something no other bridge in the world can claim.